Books, Arts & Manners: Salvaged from Schmaltz

THE music coming in on the car radio was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but it was being murdered. The slow tempos were too slow, the fast too fast, the piano passages overstated, and schmaltz was destroying the crisp evocation of 1920s jazz. “André Previn,” I said to my wife. And so it was, as it was eventually announced. The Rhapsody has long been the victim of attempts to give it longhair vapors, and those who really love the piece should turn to the original Paul Whiteman rendition with the composer at the piano, which the Smithsonian issued in its historic Gershwin compendium.

Comes now a new recording which moves in another direction. In Portraits in Blue (Sony SK 68488), the very fine young jazz pianist Marcus Roberts has added to the Rhapsody in Bluea series of strictly jazz improvisations based on Gershwin’s score. What Gershwin might have felt about this is anyone’s guess, but I suspect he would have approved. For the Roberts jazz cadenzas are fine in themselves, and appropriate to the score; they give the work contemporaneity, and also bring it back to the composer’s intent. Included on the CD is an orchestration by William Grant Still, the great and forgotten composer and arranger, of James P. Johnson’s piano score of his “opera” Yamekraw, a work that has been completely and undeservedly forgotten. With Roberts in these efforts are the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Robert Sadin conducting.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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THE music coming in on the car radio was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but it was being murdered. The slow tempos were too slow, the fast too fast, the piano passages overstated, and schmaltz was destroying the crisp evocation of 1920s jazz. “André Previn,” I said to my wife. And so it was, as it was eventually announced. The Rhapsody has long been the victim of attempts to give it longhair vapors, and those who really love the piece should turn to the original Paul Whiteman rendition with the composer at the piano, which the Smithsonian issued in its historic Gershwin compendium.

Comes now a new recording which moves in another direction. In Portraits in Blue (Sony SK 68488), the very fine young jazz pianist Marcus Roberts has added to the Rhapsody in Bluea series of strictly jazz improvisations based on Gershwin’s score. What Gershwin might have felt about this is anyone’s guess, but I suspect he would have approved. For the Roberts jazz cadenzas are fine in themselves, and appropriate to the score; they give the work contemporaneity, and also bring it back to the composer’s intent. Included on the CD is an orchestration by William Grant Still, the great and forgotten composer and arranger, of James P. Johnson’s piano score of his “opera” Yamekraw, a work that has been completely and undeservedly forgotten. With Roberts in these efforts are the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Robert Sadin conducting.